Talkin’ Nerdy: 10 Things We DON’T Want to See in the Next Fantastic Four Movie

With their latest Fantastic Four reboot (hereinafter referred to as “Fant4stic”), 20th Century Fox was attempting to make a new comic book movie franchise. Instead, they seemed to have created a new species: the Tank-a-Saurus.

Why can’t anybody make a good Fantastic Four movie? Is it really that hard? The elements for success are all there; why is it that every time this team hits the big screen, it turns into turd? Since it doesn’t look like there’s going to be a sequel to this movie, nay, we probably won’t be getting anything else Fantastic Four related for at least another 5 years, we at Twinsanity would like to offer to any Hollywood movie moguls who may consider rebooting this property yet again:

10 THINGS WE DON’T WANT TO SEE IN THE NEXT FANTASTIC FOUR MOVIE

We don’t want to see the origin story again.

Seriously. By now there are as yet undiscovered tribes in the heart of the Peruvian jungle who know how the Fantastic Four got their powers. How about for a nice change of pace we start the next F4 movie with the team already established as famous adventurers, and they only briefly reference their back story for a 5-minute flashback sequence? We’d greatly appreciate that.

2. We don’t want the team to be Millenials.

Stop making the F4 a teen team. For the next go-round, we’d like to get an adult Reed Richards, white temples and all, an adult Sue Storm-Richards (who’s married to Reed), an adult Ben Grimm and a teenage (or college age) Johnny Storm. The Fantastic Four don’t always have to represent the Pepsi Generation.

3. We don’t want them to be portrayed as superheroes.

A commenting poster on the interwebz recently referred to the Fantastic Four as their “least favorite superhero team”. That’s incorrect on 2 counts: 1) because they are in fact awesome and 2) they’re not superheroes. This tends to get glossed over, but the F4 are not, in fact, superheroes; they’re explorers and adventurers. Have you ever seen the F4 chasing down bank robbers? No, because that’s not what they do. They unravel the mysteries of the universe, further science and progress and explore the unknown, usually leading to expeditions into space and weirdo dimensions. One of the reasons why Guardians of the Galaxy did so well was because it was off-center from the norm, it wasn’t a traditional superhero flick with caped good guys smacking down criminals in a cityscape. A new Fantastic Four movie should take a similar approach. We’d do it like Jonny Quest with superpowers.

4. We don’t want Dr. Doom to be the villain.

“Now you face Doom…again!”

Come on, filmmakers. We’ve seen the team battle Dr. Doom. Thrice. Yeah, Doom is their greatest foe and all that good stuff, but he’s not the only member of the F4’s rogues’ gallery. Have them take on the Mole Man, Annihilus, the Wizard, Klaw, Psycho-Man, the Mad Thinker, the Sub-Mariner, the Kool-Aid Man. Somebody else. Anybody else!

5. We don’t want interracial Storms.

Let’s be clear: we have absolutely no problem with interracial families or people who adopt children of different races, and we likewise had no issue with an African-American actor being cast as Johnny Storm. But we say if you’re going to make 1 of the Storms African-American, then you might as well make both of them African-American. It just seemed as though the producers of Fant4stic wanted to eat their cake and have it too; they wanted to have a black guy on the team for racial balance while keeping Hollywood’s pretty white girl quotient intact. ‘Cause of course Reed Richards couldn’t be romantically be involved with a woman of color. The leading lady of a movie couldn’t possibly be African-American! Oh no, no, no! Seriously, if we can have a white Ben Grimm dating a black Alicia Masters without everybody going nuts, then we shouldn’t have any problem with a Caucasian Reed Richards involved with an African-American Susan Storm.

6. We don’t want Reed and Sue to “just like” each other.

This kind of ties into #2. So far, every cinematic depiction of the F4 chooses to start very early in Reed and Sue’s relationship, as if the very idea of a happily married couple of adult superheroes somehow makes for lame cinema. There are 2 words that counter that: One of them is The and the other is Incredibles. We’d like to see the next F4 flick start with Sue and Reed already married and having been married for some time; this way the romance is kept low-key and drama-free. Heck, just for the sake of variety, why not add their kids Franklin and Valeria Richards to the next film, since they’ve never been depicted on the big screen as of yet? That would help reinforce how in love Sue and Reed are by showing us how ‘biz-zay’ they’ve been getting.

Kid characters can work, provided they’re not cast as Annoying Kid Sidekicks Who Try To ‘Help’ The Heroes But Are Just Gratingly Annoying (see Spritle, Wendy & Marvin, Zack the 5th Ninja Turtle and Scott Tracker). Just keep their roles minimal, keep them young kids and don’t make them ridiculously powerful. None of that ‘Franklin is a god who can create pocket universes and Galactus becomes his herald’ BS.

7. We don’t want them to not have an HQ.

This also ties into #2. Since all the movies up to this point have portrayed the team as “Do the Dew” Millemials, they never have their own base of operations as the films always take place very early in the team’s careers. Since as previously stated we’d prefer to see the F4 as already established and famous super-adventurers, we’d like to see the Four Freedoms Plaza show up in the movies. All 100 floors, the hangar for the Fantasticar, the Negative Zone portal, Reed’s lab, the observatory, Roberta the robot receptionist, the ‘4’ insignia plastered on everything, all of it. Heck, we’d even be OK with H.E.R.B.I.E. the robot showing up, as long as he’d be kept in the background and wasn’t elevated to post-Q5 Slimer status.

8. We don’t want the black jumpsuits.

Those wack black jumpsuit things the team wore in Fant4stic were indicative of everything that was wrong with that film. They were trying too hard to make the movie grounded and serious, and the Fantastic Four was never meant to be grounded or serious. The F4 is about crazy science and wacky World of Tomorrow technology, and the team’s outfits should reflect that.

Stylin’!

We want the garish bright blue costumes with the ‘4’ logo adorning them. Speaking of clothes…

9. We don’t want the Thing to be naked.

To their credit, Fant4stic got the look of the Thing pretty good, but did he really have to go around starkers?! We don’t know whether or not the Thing has a thing, but in any event we don’t want to see it. Personally, we’d prefer if Ben wore a shirt…

You can tell he’s been to the gym.

…but we’d settle for some clothing as opposed to none at all. The poor guy’s had to deal with the loss of his human form and has to walk around as an orange rock monster, he’s suffered enough.

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3 Comments

“Since all the movies up to this point have portrayed the team as ‘Do the Dew’ Millenials”
Wait, Michael Chiklis and Ioan Grufford were Gen Xers (1963 and 1973 respectively). I also realized Grufford and Alba have an 8-year difference apart from one another…awkward.

Another thing to add: have actual decent story structure. The first movie was “got their powers” for the first act, “work together to save the day” for the third act, and the second act? Lame comedy bits and Reed trying to get rid of their powers, but going nowhere. BOR-ING! Apparently the FF ’15 movie has the pacing and structure issues as well, but I haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t confirm that.

Amusing, but I totally disagree. I’d like to see a GOOD Fantastic Four movie in my lifetime. That and a good Superman movie. The First Family of superhero comics deserves a flick that doesn’t suck noodles.